1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to locating and organizing information on a wide area computer network such as the Internet, and more particularly, to a method and system for performing a user-specified search of information on the Internet, and for creating search result pages.
2. Description of the Related Art
The amount and variety of information accessible on the Internet, and in particular, through the World Wide Web, is now extremely vast and continues to grow very rapidly. At the same time, as the Internet grows in popularity, quickly locating useful and accurate information on the Internet is becoming both more important and more difficult.
Various methods, such as employed by search engines and Internet directories, have been developed to help Internet users locate information. Search engines and Internet directories are typically accessible through Web sites. Some Web sites provide access to multiple search engines, or to combinations of search engines and directories. Although they operate differently, search engines and directories all deliver their information in a similar format i.e., as a list of URL's for selected websites (commonly called “hits”), organized by category and/or by search query. Typically, each hit is presented as a hyperlink on a HyperText Mark-up Language (HTML) results page produced by the search engine or directory. Such results pages may list other information about each hit, such as the Web site Meta Tags, and rank the hits using a variety of ranking algorithms.
Search engines are capable of locating information from a large set of Web pages, but frequently at the cost of making it more difficult to locate the most relevant information. A typical search engine utilizes a database containing an enormous, frequently updated index of Web pages. The database is maintained and updated using an automated or semi-automated process relying on a variety of indexing, searching, and ranking algorithms. The operation of various search algorithms are known, and it is not uncommon for Web page authors to deliberately design pages in a manner that boosts the likelihood of being selected by a search engine as highly relevant to a particular topic, when the actual information content of the page pertaining to the topic is poor or even completely irrelevant. Also, many Web pages that are not deliberately designed to be selected by a searching algorithm are nonetheless selected inappropriately for other reasons. For example, a search for a word having multiple meanings will retrieve results for all of the meanings, although results for only a single meaning are usually desired. Perhaps even more frequently, pages with many of the query keywords nonetheless have little useful information. Thus, because of the enormous size of the search engines' databases, and the limitations of the algorithms employed by them, search engines often provide a large quantity of useless or irrelevant information. It is often very time-consuming for a user to evaluate and discard the many useless results that are returned.
In contrast, Internet directories are typically maintained and updated mostly by human operators. Such operators are employed by the operator of the directory for this purpose. This approach frequently permits a user to locate a relevant Web site more quickly than using a search engine, but it has the drawback of greatly limiting the scope of the search. Because of the enormous size of the Internet and frequent changes in its information content, it would be far too costly to employ a staff large enough to organize any substantial portion of Internet Web pages into a directory. And, even if such an effort were economically feasible, it is quite likely that any resulting directory would be so large that it would be difficult and time-consuming to navigate. Thus, Internet directories allow a user to locate information more quickly, but only if the information is located on a very limited set of Web pages.
Thus, there exists a need for a method and system for searching a wide area network, that overcomes the limitations of prior art search engines and directories as summarized above.